Folie a Deux
by Haunted Cottage
Summary: Sex, lies and soup tureens.
1. Chapter 1

Ghosts can either be temporarily solid or completely ectoplasmic but they can't be both at the same time, not even a poltergeist like Daniel Gregg. He knew this but forgot about paranormal logistics while stuffing his mouth with Martha's last piece of cherry pie. He rose from the table, meaning to carry his dish magnanimously to the sink but ran smack into Martha as she turned to remove the soup tureen from the table. Captain Gregg managed to hold onto his plate but the Blue Willow bowl fractured into a thousand small pieces. Martha eyed the Captain warily. The kids froze. The room was deadly quiet until Carolyn's fork clattered, unbidden, onto her plate as she stared at the Captain with an intensity that was impossible to read. Candy and Jonathan snickered nervously – it was Martha who had cautioned them never to discuss the Captain's convenient corporality with their woefully clueless mother.

"They'll figure it out and when they do, everything will change," Martha foretold ominously just two weeks earlier. Candy, whose only experience of her mother and men revolved around her very-dead father, thought such a disclosure would cause great fights between the two. Jonathan hoped the Captain would just touch his mom on the nose and get it over with so the two of them could marry, thereby ensuring the continued presence of his nautical hero at Gull Cottage. For her part, Martha'd had just about enough of the unresolved sexual tension that permeated the atmosphere of any room the bickering duo inhabited. Longing, she wisely noted, was passive and required obstacles. Desire, well, there would be nothing passive about that once her employer and dear friend, who'd been celibate for over four years, caught up with the Captain. Carolyn might look like a cool cucumber, but she didn't fool Martha, who'd known her since the beautiful blonde's halcyon college days.

Yet now, at that very moment of reckoning, the two of them simply stared at each other. Captain Gregg did not dematerialize in the puerile fashion to which he had recently become accustomed. The ladylike but tempestuous Carolyn Muir did not throw her own pie plate at the Captain. The Harlequin moment would come later, if ever. "Kids, upstairs for baths. Now," Martha barked, hurriedly ushering them out of the kitchen. Jonathan and Candy, just beginning to grasp the seriousness of the situation, gawked at their mother, whose color was higher than they could ever remember. "Good night, kids," she began, her voice shaking, her eyes riveted on the Captain. "Go. Now." And they tread reluctantly up the stairs, tiptoeing lightly in the hopes of overhearing one iota of conversation that might augur well for their favored champ, the Captain. Instead, all they got was a barked snippet from their mother: "Daniel, please do your ghost thing and reassemble that soup tureen before Scruffy tears his tongue up trying to lick food off the fragments."

Then nothing. With Martha's tacit permission, the children even lingered on the landing, hoping for some sound of conciliatory talk or even gestures. Silence. "She can't keel-haul him in the kitchen," Jonathan mumbled on his way down the corridor. Candy was lost in thought, remembering how angry her mother could be towards a man. Martha meanwhile was scripting the excuses she'd be forced to offer up sometime in the morning, after Carolyn realized she'd been left out of the six-month party by her own housekeeper and offspring. Candy hopped into the tub first, scrubbing herself morosely with the pink washcloth. When she was dried and nightgowned-up, Jonathan crawled into the bathtub, held his breath and sank dramatically under the dwindling bubbles, wondering how it would feel to be dragged under a ship. The silence held downstairs until each of the Muir children reached their respective beds and Martha returned down the stairs and slunk unobtrusively, for a change, into her own bedroom.

Meanwhile, Carolyn's gaze remained fixed on the Captain, who wisely waited in order to better measure his response to hers. "Well," she offered quietly, once all was seemingly settled in the house. "I'll leave you to the dishes then." The Captain quickly wiggled a finger and the knives, forks and plates danced merrily toward the sink, leaving him to block the doorway to the foyer. His tender cornflower blue eyes gazed longingly down at Carolyn, begging her forgiveness. Her tear-filled green eyes flashed back. "Get out of my way, Daniel Gregg. Don't touch me. Now or ever." He reached for her arm as she twisted her way toward the stairs. She spun around, and standing on the first step, slapped him resoundingly across his face then leaned toward him until her lips were inches from his. "If you think this is the part where you get to sweep me off my feet, carry me kicking upstairs and spread my legs apart on 'our' bed you have another thing coming. Not now, not even in my afterlife." She almost carried this last off convincingly until the tears started pouring from her eyes and the Captain, an expert at bluster, realized hers for what it was and indeed swept her off her feet. Carolyn tightened her arms around his neck and cried into his soft gray sweater. "Not upstairs," she sobbed. "They'll all be listening."

"Nay, Madame," he murmured as he began up the stairs. "I've just blasted them all into a very sound slumber." As he reached the top he kissed her head and she squirmed slightly in his embrace, wondering if this were the time to raise her face to his and suffer the consequences. Instead, he deposited her lightly at their bedroom door, holding her closely until she regained her balance.


	2. Chapter 2

The door swung open, on its own. "After you, Madame." Carolyn eyed him nervously and chewed on her lower lip. Was he kidding? No woman in her stories actually walked to their own seduction. She skittishly entered the room. A fire burned brightly in the hearth. Roses were strewn loosely across the bed, and a brandy sifter breathed delicately on the nightstand. Candles glowed on her desk. She wiped the tears from her eyes and tried to recover some of her earlier defiance.

"I suppose this is how you intended to tell me some day that you are semi-solid when the mood strikes and, after you've conspired with my own children to make a laughingstock out of me?" Feigned anger once again prominently on display, she seated herself in front of her typewriter and fooled officiously with the carriage return, as if she were preparing to rewrite the last six months of her spectral cohabitation. "Six months, Captain! Six months. And don't tell me you did it because you thought I'd flee Gull Cottage rather than live with an amorous ghost. Of course I would have!" And there she stopped herself, realizing that once again, her mouth was writing checks her emotions couldn't cash. No wonder the children and Martha looked so concerned.

Patience, thought the Captain. Not that Carolyn was anything like his previous conquests, but he felt he had some authority in such matters. "I mean," she lowered her eyes. "Blast it, I hate you! Do you know how many nights I've lain over there, fantasizing about how it would feel if I awakened to your kiss, to the warmth of your hand as it pushed my nightgown high over my breasts?" With a very intense smile, the Captain gallantly waved his hand toward the bed. "My dear, I hope you make love as elegantly as you emote. I would be happy to follow this plot line to its er, logical conclusion. After I move the roses, of course."

No, Carolyn thought. If she was going to succumb to her intense desire to plaster herself shamelessly against him, it wouldn't be until he'd earned that surrender, until his mind was as befuddled as hers, until she had the power back and he fully realized the magnitude of his big mistake. Move the roses indeed. He'd made her wait six long months, during which they'd shared roughly 180 intimate walks on the beach, countless hours bickering over trivial incidents that masked deeper feelings, plenty of verbal foreplay and hundreds of intimate looks. And even this list did not include the lonely night watches when she'd debated whether she could actually survive another 50 or so years without physical love.

When she looked up, her Daniel was standing in front of the fireplace, stoking the fire with a poker. He wasn't wearing a shirt. Carolyn's breath grew ragged. "That's not fair," she whispered, realizing for the first time in forever she was completely wet and the Captain was staring at her mouth. He turned, she saw that he, too, was fully aroused. Without thinking, she began unbuttoning her silk blouse.

Here, he hesitated. Daniel Gregg had slept with plenty of women who wanted to love him, but never with one he loved. Tenuously, he walked toward her and stooped downward, kissing her as she sat in the chair, his hands working the remaining buttons and his tongue her mouth. Carolyn wound her hands again around his neck, kissing him even harder on the mouth, and he lifted her again and laid her lovingly atop the down comforter. She sat up, unhooking her bra but letting him pull it gently away and down her arms. Then she looked deeply into his eyes and ran her hands lightly over the bulge in his pants before loosening his belt and unbuttoning his 19th-century trousers. The Captain groaned unabashedly as she pressed her face into the fullness of his erection, aroused by his muskiness, unbothered by her own forwardness.

"Later, me dear," and he eased her back into the pillows and found her neck with his mouth, hands first at her breasts then urgently pushing her skirt upwards and her damp undergarments down onto the floor. With his knee, he pried her legs apart and entered her needily, and she gasped at his size then in amazement as she came almost instantly with an intensity that overrode any folly on his part. The Captain, who'd never made love to a mortal, followed soon behind and as he did, Carolyn wondered at the sense of oneness and completeness that overwhelmed her again, only this time even she did not recognize the sounds coming out of her mouth. She clung to the Captain, running her hands over the smooth of his sweaty, heaving back as he tried to recover from his own revelation.

When they finally separated, an hour or so later, she sat up, trying to recover her breath. She reached for the brandy, pouring them each a generous glass of amber. It wasn't until she replaced the sifter on the nightstand that she noticed an elegantly folded piece of heavy bond paper, officially sealed shut with the waxen initials "DG." "Captain, what's this?" Flustered, she blew a wisp of stubborn hair out of her eyes as she took a big gulp of brandy. "Madame, there's no need to brace yourself. That was merely my plan B, in case we ran aground this evening and I was forced to retire to the Wheelhouse, alone for all eternity. Open it." With hands still trembling from their recent exertion, Carolyn opened the note and read:

_If you want what visible reality can give, you're an employee. If you want the unseen world, you're not living your truth. Both wishes are foolish, but you'll be forgiven for forgetting that what you really want is love's confusing joy._

_-- Rumi_


End file.
